she knew about us. Trust me, she’s not that engaged.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘In some ways she was very like Daniel, but more so, if you know what I mean. Daniel’s wife was the real environmental freak. And I mean extreme. She’s a strict vegan and believes that we should make zero impact on the planet. She got involved in some group with weird ideas. I mean really weird ideas. Daniel was involved with them too, but not in the same way she was. I think she dragged him into it to start with. The sad thing is I think that at one time, not so long ago, Daniel really loved her. The way he put it to me was that she simply disappeared… faded away. I don’t think he would ever have got involved with me if she hadn’t gone all weird. The funny thing is I sensed the same thing happening to Daniel. He was fading away. Becoming weird.’
‘Group? What kind of group?’ asked Fabel, although he was pretty sure he already knew the answer.
‘More of a cult,’ said Kempfert. ‘They call themselves Pharos, or something.’
Fabel nodded slowly, looking down at his notebook. A deliberate movement to conceal from Victoria Kempfert the significance of what she had just told him.
‘You say he was involved with this group too, but not to the same degree?’
‘Well, yes. But, from what I could gather, they didn’t believe in degrees of involvement. You had to give yourself totally to Pharos. It creeped me out a bit. More than a bit. Daniel was a bright guy. He had great ideas but didn’t have the money to back them up. His wife was loaded, though. She bankrolled him to start with but he built up his business to become a leader in the field. The price he had to pay was to become a member of Pharos. He used to joke about it.’ Kempfert frowned. ‘Then he stopped. In fact, he stopped joking about anything much.’
‘He changed?’
‘He was changing. I told him to get out while he could. I could tell that a big part of him really wanted to, but every time I met him it was like that part of him was getting smaller. As if a little more of his personality — a little more self-will — had been sucked out of him. That’s what I meant when I said it was all getting tiresome.’ She paused. ‘Listen, Herr Fabel, I wasn’t that much into Daniel. Even at the start. It was fun — he was fun — to begin with, but then it all got a little tired. And the weird stuff with this group that he and his wife were involved with.’
‘You wanted out?’
‘I told him at lunch. Right before that happened to him. Can you imagine how that makes me feel?’
‘You weren’t to know, Frau Kempfert. How did he take it?’
‘Well. So well, in fact, I could have let it damage my ego. It was as it he didn’t care. Actually, more like he was relieved.’
As Fabel crossed the street to his car, he did not need to turn to know that Victoria Kempfert was watching him from her window. She had been all prickles; defiant to the point of hostility. It was, he knew, part of the denial process that followed a trauma such as the one she had experienced. But there was more to it. There was something she had wanted to tell Fabel but had been too unsure or afraid to voice. Instead she had ring-fenced it with verbal barbs. He took his cellphone out and hit the speed dial for the Murder Commission, before realising that this was the replacement phone and did not have the number stored. It took him a moment to recall it and key it in: the irony of technology making life easier was that you forgot how to do things for yourself. He got hold of Anna Wolff.
‘Anna, I need you to run a couple of checks for me. And I need them quickly.’
‘Okay, anything for our number one suspect. The last time you had someone checked they ended up dead.’
‘When this is over, Commissar Wolff, I’m going to have you transferred to Buxtehude where the highlight of your week, of your month, will be a bicycle theft.’
‘Oh no!’ she said with mock horror. ‘That’s too far away from Billwerder prison. I’ll never get to visit you. Who do you want checked out?’
‘The guy who was burned in that arson attack in the Schanzenviertel. Daniel Fottinger. And the woman who was with him, Victoria Kempfert.’
‘Okay. You heading back in?’
‘I’ll be in later. I’ve got another house call to make.’ Fabel used his remote to unlock his BMW and slid in behind the driver’s seat. He checked his rear-view mirror. Yes. Still there. ‘Anna, there’s one more thing I need you to run through the computer. And keep this to yourself. I’m being followed. A new VW four-by-four. A Tiguan, I think. It’s been popping up in my rear-view mirror all day. I suspect it’s either one of ours or a BfV team. I just want to make sure.’
‘Shit… you don’t think anyone really suspects…’
‘I doubt it,’ said Fabel, ‘but they’re maybe keeping tabs on me just to keep things straight, as Criminal Director van Heiden would say.’
‘Index number?’
Fabel strained to make it out in the rear-view mirror and read it out to Anna.
‘Give me a couple of minutes,’ she said.
Hamburg’s architecture tells you in a very discreet, decorous way that this is a city where some serious money is made. Daniel Fottinger’s house lay where Nienstedten became Blankenese and somehow managed to scream massive wealth quietly. It was set in four hectares of some of the most expensive real estate in Germany. Given the business Fottinger had been in, Fabel had expected it to be the same kind of ultra-modern zero-carbon set-up as Muller-Voigt’s house in the Altes Land. Instead it was an elegant white aristocratic nineteenth-century villa with green shuttered windows and a double-storey aviary-cum-conservatory on its east side. Its grounds were laid out like an English park, its lawns punctuated by century-matured oaks.
It was not at all what Fabel had expected. But what he had expected was that Fottinger’s widow would not be alone. He was right.
At first, given the grandeur of the surroundings, Fabel assumed that the stocky, impeccably neat man with the shaven head and the goatee beard who opened the front door to him was the butler. But it was apparent from his tailoring and demeanour that this was no manservant. He showed Fabel into a huge, bright drawing room. Another, younger, man stood over by the far wall, next to a grand piano. He too was wearing a business suit, but his was grey and not of the same quality. The younger man was made distinctive by the contrast between his pale complexion and his extremely dark, short hair.
The only other person in the room was a woman of about thirty-five sitting on a rosewood settee. She was slim, with shoulder-length wavy hair of a vibrant auburn brushed back from her delicately modelled, pale and lightly freckled face. She wore a simple, black, sleeveless dress that clung to her slim figure in a way that only the most expensive fabrics could and her poise was so perfect that she gave the impression of sitting on the settee without actually touching it.
Fabel’s first impression of Kirstin Fottinger was that she was made of fine china.
In terms of attractiveness she was the equal of Fottinger’s mistress, but hers was a totally different type of beauty. Where Victoria Kempfert was the kind of woman men desired, Kirstin Fottinger was like a fragile, beautiful, expensive object to be collected and preserved. And there was something about her, thought Fabel, that made her seem otherworldly.
‘I’m glad you could make time to meet with me, Frau Fottinger,’ he said. ‘I know you must be in shock after what has happened.’
She smiled a polite porcelain smile. The truth was that she did not seem to Fabel to be in a state of much shock at all, and less grief. Perhaps it was a forced composure that had temporarily robbed her of expression.
‘Frau Fottinger has taken something to help. A mild sedative prescribed by her doctor,’ said the older man who had led Fabel into the drawing room.
‘And you are?’ Fabel turned to face him fully.
‘Peter Wiegand. I’m a friend of the family. I was also a business associate of Daniel’s.’
‘Peter Wiegand? You’re the deputy leader of the Pharos Project, aren’t you?’
‘I have worked with Dominik Korn for close to thirty years. My principal role is Vice President and Director of Operations of the Korn-Pharos Corporation. But yes, I am also active in the Pharos Project. Both Kirstin and her husband are members of the Project, so I am here to lend my support and comfort at this difficult time.’
‘I see.’ Fabel looked pointedly at the other man.
‘Oh, sorry…’ said Wiegand. ‘This is Herr Badorf. He is our chief of security for the group. I felt, given the
